Battle of Cocos

The Battle of Cocos was a naval battle fought off the Cocos Islands on 9 November 1914 during World War I. The Australian Royal Navy light cruiser HMAS Sydney defeated the Imperial German Navy light cruiser SMS Emden, which was beached on the Cocos Islands. The German defeat at Cocos allowed for the Australians to redeploy their navy to other theatres, as the German presence in the Pacific Ocean was terminated.

Background
Britain was well aware that its dominant position in world commerce and its heavy dependence on imports made its merchant ships a target for Germany. The Imperial German Navy faced problems in mounting a commerce-raiding campaign. The Royal Navy established a blockade of the English Channel and North Sea from the first day of the war. German ships at large elsewhere had difficulty obtaining coal, which was readily available to Britain and France through their empires.

Britain had already been threatened by two German light cruisers. In the Indian Ocean, the SMS Konigsberg had been troublesome until it was trapped by the Royal Navy in the East African Rufiji Delta in late October 1914. In the Caribbean, SMS Karlsruhe had sunk 16 merchant ships. German hopes for the Karlsruhe were dashed, however, when it suffered a catastrophic internal explosion off Barbados on 4 November.

The Emden
Almost half the world's merchant shipping was owned by Britain and its dominions. Britain depended on seaborne imports for 60% of its food, as well as essential strategic goods such as rubber and oil. Worldwide sea lanes were potentially hard to defend, and attacks on them by German warships posed a serious threat to Britain's ability to wage war. The only significant force of German warships at large on the world's oceans was the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron, commanded by Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee. The squadron consisted of the powerful armored cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the light cruisers SMS Emden, Leipzig, and Nurnberg. Its base was Tsingtao in China, but when war broke out the cruisers were scattered across the Pacific. Assembling his ships in the German-ruled Mariana Islands, Spee decided to head east towards South America, away from the Imperial Japanese Navy, Britain's ally. The Emden, commanded by Captain Karl von Muller, was sent to the Indian Ocean.

The unexpected appearance of the Emden in an ocean rich in allied merchant shipping caused mayhem. Operating with scrupulous respect for the rules of war, Muller stopped and sank 16 British merchant ships and a dozen vessels from other nations, each time allowing the crew and passengers to disembark and ensuring their safety. Muller also carried out a number of daring raids against significant Allied shore targets, such as destroying oil-storage facilities at Madras in India and sinking a Russian light cruiser and a French destroyer in an attack on the port of Penang in British Malaya (now Malaysia).

Battle
With 60 Allied warships scouring the ocean, the raider's career could not continue indefinitely. On 9 November 1914, the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney, commanded by Captain John Glossop, encountered Emden at Direction Island in the Cocos Islands. Sydneys 152mm guns outranged Emdens lighter armament and Muller was battered into submission. By the time Muller surrendered, 130 of his crew had been killed and many others injured. This was a famous first victory for the recently established Royal Australian Navy. The impact of Emden's solo operation suggests that Spee's other cruisers might have caused havoc had they dispersed. Instead, Spee kept them together, a decision that seemed justified when he encountered the British at Coronel, off the coast of Chile.